Category: Definitions

I'm unsure of the answer. Just google it. Camila thinks her boyfriend might be ghosting her. The marketing team seems to take a lot of selfies. Many of us have spoken or heard expressions including words such as those identified above. While many principles of good grammar remained fixed in English, our vocabulary is always …

English includes two primary groups of letters and sounds. One group is the consonants. We make the consonant sounds by changing and restricting airflow in our mouth or nose as we speak, such as with our teeth, tongue, or lips. The other group is the vowels. We produce vowel sounds with unrestricted airflow shaped mainly …

Language gives us the system to fashion our thoughts into understood expressions. To achieve that, it arranges single-unit characters (letters) into larger units (words) with meanings we assign. We depend on language sounds for our understanding of it just as well. Whether heard by our outer ears or the inner ones in our mind, language …

We all have something new to learn from Generation Alpha, or those born after 2010. Among those of us born before 2000, we might wonder what that could be, because normally it would be we passing along our experience-based wisdom and knowledge to the younger generation. But like all others before them, Generation A is …

Language is the system we use to speak, write, and sign (manually) to express ourselves within our social groups. Distinctive to our species, it gives us a powerful means to inform, play, imagine, persuade, and release (e.g., our feelings). While a specific number can vary, many estimates suggest that English includes more than one million …

Language is the means by which we communicate through words with structure and meaning. Starting at an early age, we become increasingly aware of how words join with other words to form larger units such as phrases, clauses, and sentences, which can then together make paragraphs. In an opposite way, words also can be divided …

Communication is as much about sounds we make and interpret with meaning as it is words that are written with thought. Approximations of dates of origin of human speech have varied from 200,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago. Some recent research suggests our first speech sounds were made around 70,000 years ago. Unlike nonhuman …

The art of language embraces sound just as it does precision and eloquence of written expression. For example, along the way we've discussed alliteration, which is the repetition of two or more neighboring sounds of words, often initial letters, to create a phonetic device: simple story accept and excel The repeating alliterative sounds occur either …

Language evolves as we do. Over time, we become agents of change in shaping words to suit our sense of comfort, ease, and desired sound. This agency appears when we add a sound to a word that is already established without it. For instance, perhaps we have said or heard "athlete" pronounced as "ath-uh-lete" or …

If you care to be honest, you'll admit that Delilah is a ne'er-do-well. Ralph should probably offer to share that ham sandwich, or Billy Ray is gonna snatch it from him anyway. Coulda, shoulda, woulda: This is what happens when we don't change the oil. Many of us who use American English have probably read, …